Poppy Field in a Hollow near Giverny

Monet had moved to the village of Giverny in 1883, and spent the next years walking out into the surrounding fields with his canvases. This poppy field lies in a hollow just outside the village, painted in the summer of 1885. By then the group that had shown together as Impressionists a decade earlier was coming apart. Several of the old friends had turned back toward drawing and the studio, and the last of their joint exhibitions, in 1886, would take place without Monet in it. He kept insisting he was still an Impressionist and always would be, and you can see the argument in the paint. The reds of the poppies and the greens around them sit side by side so they seem to buzz, and the slope of the land is carried by the direction of the brush rather than any drawn line. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which owns the picture, was among the first American collections to buy Monet in numbers while he was still alive.